Before I got to the point in my education where I learned what the CPU has eaten it seemed that software programming languages had a ladder of more abstract and more concredte languages but it seemed it was just an issue of translating one language to the other. The primitive “takes orders” capacity seemed mysterious how it could ever appear or be explained in the hierachy. The beauty of learning what a primitive computer was like is in that none of the parts “take orders”, its the software that is done entirely in hardware.
But processors are extrenally driven. For agents I suspect the core property is auto-poesis ie being run from signals emerging from within. Circuits will do some computation when excited but then “sleep” if the enviornemnt is not actively pushing in. Computers can keep up the excitation but will do essentially the same pattern unless disturbed from outside. Agents are the things that keep on changing their pattern even if the environment leaves them alone (or their evolution is because of the echo they make into the environment).
So what is the point where its correct to bin the sensor as alarmist?
Pondering this I lean that the main takeaway is that if you “cry” anything then no amount of what you cry can make it effective for low-probablity events. Crying “there is a 0.001% chance of wolf” is in practise going to be nearly equivalent to communicating about 20% chance of wolf. But if you say “there is a 0.001% chance of wolf” maybe that works for 5% and if you whisper you can get under 1%.
The second is that people can disagree what prepardness thresholds are proper. Say that the village runs out 10 times in responce to 5% reports and then can only harvest half the crop for being exhausted from running all the time killing 20% people to starvation. As a wolf-expert I am not likely to be the most well versed on food shortage events. So when I make judgement calls on where it is better to be safe than sorry I am likely to be atleast somewhat ignorant. So even an honest private trade-off might not be be socially optimal. The problem disappears if the village thinks the fortifications for nothing are worth the effort.